Meet Hope Medford
As a former licensed and nationally certified professional midwife, Hope Medford brings a rare combination of professional midwifery experience, extensive birth attendance, international birth education, creative practice, and embodied wisdom to the Sacred Birth Path.
With over two decades of experience, Hope has attended more than 500 births, apprenticed with eight midwives, and worked at the first waterbirth centers in the United States.
Through her work as both a doula and midwife, Hope has supported hundreds of families, Hope has witnessed an extraordinary range of births which has given her an intimate understanding of the practical, emotional, physical, and relational support women and families need throughout the birth journey.
(trained in yoga, trained massage, medical side)
This breadth of experience allows Hope to bring real-world context to her teaching. Rather than presenting birth as a single formula, she encourages students to develop the discernment to see and respond to the individual mother, baby, family, and circumstances in front of them.
Her years of practice have also given her a deep appreciation for the birth worker’s own resilience. Being present for another person’s transformation calls for the ability to remain grounded, flexible, compassionate, and attentive. These qualities, along with the knowledge and experience Hope has gathered over decades of birth work, are woven throughout the Sacred Birth Path experience.
A Teacher of Birth Workers
Hope is not only an experienced birth practitioner; she is an experienced educator of birth workers. Across two decades, Hope has taught doulas, nurses, families, and birth keepers in the United States and internationally, including teaching with the African Birth Collective in Senegal, West Africa, and working with birth workers in Brazil, Indonesia, Ireland and Peru.
Her teaching draws from years of observing birth firsthand and translating that experience into practical learning. She understands that becoming a birth worker requires more than accumulating information. It requires learning how to observe, listen, communicate, respond, stay grounded, and hold space.
This is one of the strengths Hope brings to the Sacred Birth Path: the ability to connect knowledge with the lived experience of being present at birth.
Bridging Ancient Wisdom & Modern Knowledge
Hope’s approach to birth education is rooted in a holistic integration of medical knowledge, lived experience, ancient wisdom, and embodied awareness.
Her professional midwifery training gives her a strong foundation in the physiology and practical realities of birth. At the same time, her years of working with women have deepened her understanding that birth is not only physiological. The body and the nervous system are profoundly influenced by a woman’s sense of safety, trust, connection, and nourishment. The conditions in which a woman feels held, heard, respected, and supported can become an important part of how she experiences and moves through birth.
This is at the heart of Hope’s approach: seeing the whole human being.
Rather than separating the physical from the emotional, the relational from the physiological, or the practical from the sacred, Sacred Birth Path invites students to develop a more integrated way of understanding birth. This includes honoring the intelligence of our own bodies, the feminine experience, the stories and traumas we carry, and the many layers of a woman’s life that she brings with her into birth.
Hope also brings a deep appreciation for the beauty of birth—its mystery, creativity, rhythm, intensity, vulnerability, and transformation. As an artist and professional drummer, she has explored how rhythm, voice, movement, breath, and sound can connect us more deeply to the body and to the experience of birth.
Students are therefore invited to learn birth through more than concepts and clinical knowledge. They are invited to cultivate presence, listening, discernment, intuition, creativity, and embodied awareness, while developing practical skills for supporting mothers and their babies.
This is the bridge Hope offers: the wisdom of the body alongside the knowledge of modern birth care; the practical alongside the sacred; and the science alongside the beauty and humanity of birth.